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In their second album of the year – an impressive feat in itself – Beach House takes a pointed step in the electronically stripped-down direction it dithered in earlier this year with Depression Cherry.

Thank Your Lucky Stars is stippled with grungy lead guitar, raw vocals and tracks featuring comparatively minimal instrumental use for a band so known for its echoes and layers.

While the single finder on Beach House’s website (you feed it three of your favourite Beach House songs; it recommends a track for you off Thank Your Lucky Stars) is a charming slice of computer magic, it reads me wrong with its suggestion of “She’s So Lovely”, no matter how captivating this song’s contagious melancholy.

My favourite track off this album, hands down, is “One Thing”. This 90s-nostalgic, sentimental grunge track is eerily and astoundingly reminiscent of early Radiohead in its chord progression and vocal melody, complete with distorted power chords.

With this release, combined with Depression Cherry, Beach House has rapidly climbed from a band I liked but didn’t think about very often, to a band I will probably pepper my “it’s okay, not many people have heard of them” conversations with whenever I make poor attempts at socializing.

Thank you, Beach House – with these nine tracks, at least one sad person feels slightly more understood.

Beach House‘s first studio album since Bloom feels rawer and more edgy than the 2012 release.

Depression Cherry features some remarkable instrumental scenes: the swelling buildup that is “Levitation”, the starting track gently and poignantly tugging you by the heart-strings into the album’s understated poignance; the gritty lead guitar singing bittersweetly over the echoey vocal layers in “Sparks”.

The vocals – particularly Victoria Legrand’s – seem to have been brought forward from their instrumental environs: as a result, Depression Cherry feels more intimate than the musicbox of echoes that was Bloom.

Apparently moving into darker emotional territory, the US duo’s fifth studio album presents a plaintive collection of melodies which make Bloom‘s seem almost glib and repetitive by comparison.

In places – “10:37”; “PPP” – the album feels like a collection of old-school love ballads clothed in new-age synth work.

All in all, Beach House’s Depression Cherry is a subtle but sharp tug out of dream pop’s hazy torpor, and has piqued my interest in a band I had until now relegated to background music.